‘Where is Riven now, d’you know?’ Thomas asks. His voice has taken on that hard flat tone. Sir John shakes his head.

‘He has not bothered us for days. Weeks even.’

‘Then he must be with the Queen’s army,’ Thomas says.

Sir John nods as if to allow it.

‘Then this time I’ll not fail,’ Thomas says. ‘This time I’ll go and find him and I’ll put an end to it. Put an end to him. He cannot be left to live after this, not now, and we cannot go on living like this either.’

Katherine wonders if anything is ever that simple.

She sleeps that night in Sir John’s bed, Sir John sharing with Richard on the smaller truckle bed by her side, Thomas downstairs by the covered fire, keeping watch. The sheets are filthy and there is dog hair everywhere. She’s forgotten the dogs. Talbots, they were, absurd-looking things. She supposes them dead now. At some point Richard gets up in the night and fumbles his way downstairs.

What must it be like, to be blind? she wonders. To be constantly in the dark? She tries to imagine what Richard must be feeling, even apart from being left blind. She recalls Thomas’s face the moment the giant pressed his thumb into his eye on the ferryman’s skiff. It had been filled with naked terror, a sensation that surely no man would ever forget. And for someone like Richard, who thought himself a soldier, it must be doubly difficult.

Would it have been better for Richard to have been killed? Probably, she thinks. Which is why the giant didn’t do it.

Dear God! Thomas has talked of the mistake of sparing Riven’s life, but what of the giant? Even at the time she’d known they should have killed him, when he was lying stunned by the boat that morning, but they’d never have been able to do it. They were too innocent then. Now, though, she would happily crash that pollaxe into the giant’s face, happily cut his throat. For a moment her body is thronging with energy.

She feels the constriction of her shift, wrapped tight around her legs and her waist, and she wishes she were wearing a shirt and braies as she used to when she was Kit. She thinks of Thomas downstairs by the fire, wrapped in solitude, and she feels a flare of anger. He is a stubborn fool, she thinks. If he’d said just one thing, or if he’d tried for a single moment to dissuade her from pretending to be Margaret Cornford, then she would have thrown off her cloak and swapped it for some ragged boy’s clothing, and she would have resumed the life of Kit in an instant.

But now it is too late.